


daily passive user

by GoldStarGrl



Series: get back up breathing [1]
Category: Silicon Valley (TV)
Genre: Depression, Gen, POV Second Person, Sexism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-30
Updated: 2016-07-30
Packaged: 2018-07-28 07:37:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7631026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldStarGrl/pseuds/GoldStarGrl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All your life you found it easier to slip into place, go through the motions expected of you until they became second nature. Your parents named you after the Friends character, so it makes sense, you joke, that you like life orderly and controlled as your namesake. At least on paper.</p><p>Based on onlytheshortones' off-hand yet predictably devastating comment “what if Monica has clinical depression?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	daily passive user

The silicon valley had a higher-than-average concentration of residents on the autism spectrum, which made Palo Alto a city that ran on strict routine. In a place that claimed to shake up and irrevocably change the world, the days were monotonous, often blending impertably with the one that preceded and followed it.

And that worked fine for you. All your life you found it easier to slip into place, go through the motions expected of you until they became second nature. Your parents named you after the _Friends_ character, so it makes sense, you joke, that you like life orderly and controlled as your namesake. At least on paper.

You get up every morning at six to go for a run, never mind the fact most everyone you work with subsists on beer and week old Chinese takeout. But most everyone you work with also gets to skip blowing out their hair, squeezing their ass into a pencil skirt just half a size too small, and putting on makeup in stand-still traffic.

Not to mention, you’ve run every single morning since you were seventeen and the idea of skipping a day makes your heart pound and a sharp pain pulse in your temple.  A compromise for the cigarette you smoke every morning, despite your best efforts to skip it. It helps calm you down enough to fight the wave of other people's neuroses that greet you every morning at Raviga's front door, your responsibility to soothe.

* * *

Richard is talking to you. Rather, Richard is talking _at_ you, in that breathless, rambling way he does when his mouth puts up a fight against the ideas in his head. You feel the heat of the day making your nylons stick against your legs, despite the sub-arctic temperatures Laurie keeps the Raviga office submerged in. The feeling is so uncomfortable you briefly tune out his voice. You watch him run a hand through his strawberry curls. They look soft, and that mild flash of curiosity, desire shoots back through the pit of your stomach.

You used to think something might happen with you and him. He was cute enough, with that blinding sort of brilliance that got you into think business in the first place, that made you want to funnel and shape it into something life-changing, something that could last. But you waited too long, and time stripped back layers until his anxious, selfish, human qualities nearly blocked out his genius.

He’s still talking, oblivious to your glazed over eyes. He reminds you too much of Peter. That’s probably the reason you - and Gavin Belson - can’t stay away, no matter what it does to your career and sanity.

You miss Peter in random jags, sometimes with intensity like a shard of glass sunk into your abdomen, sometimes as a low, dull ache that settles into your skin. It’s always there, though, and the farther away from his funeral you get, the amount of days he never got to see piling up one by one, it’s not getting better, it’s getting worse.

“Isn’t Laurie just like him?” David asks when you grab lunch with him, too exhausted to call up someone you actually have to be _on_ for, smile and listen patiently while they talk on and on about their stupid car-parking app. You nearly shove your Cubano in his face anyway, though.

Stupid David, who still wears your grandfather’s St. Christopher pendant around his neck, still believes in God the way cheerful, middle class white guys in marketing do, because they’ve never seen life as a sisyphean task to get through, to push towards the top of despite the stone-heavy pressure weighing down on every bone in your body.

“No. He was...special.” Your LinkedIn account informs you University of Maryland is having a reunion for alumni in the SoCal area. The seven other connections - all guys - displayed as attending work at massive VCs, Hooli, Google, Twitter. None of their pages bragged of a sole account with the valley’s favorite running joke, a junior position held at a sinking ship of a company, the only job anyone in California wanted to offer a pretty girl who never finished learning Ruby on Rails. A job you find harder and harder to drive too every day, now that Peter, the one person who believed in you, who took what was considered a chance on you, haunts the halls, just out of reach.

* * *

You briefly consider your vibrator when you get home, tucked next to the balled up socks in your pajama drawer, but the idea of summoning enough energy to masturbate drains you. You change into cotton shorts and an ex’s loose 49ers t-shirt, knowing you look cute, like some cool rom-com girl. The knowledge feels more unfeminist and foolish than uplifting.

You smoke two more cigarettes out your kitchen window, picking at the salad you know you should eat, your old therapist, in typical hippie-dippie California fashion, constantly crowed about the miracle of dark greens in approving your mood.

You throw it out and walk onto your balcony, with red marks on your thighs from where your skirt dug into your skin still visible beneath the hem of your shorts. You light up again, and again, chain-smoking nearly the whole pack before you start coughing yourself blue and have to stop.

The sun set hours ago, and for all the city’s boasting of green, clean living, the light pollution still blocks out all the stars. You lean against your railing, considering the sidewalk below, considering how it doesn’t look as far away as it does some days, as it did before Peter died, as it did when you first moved here, bright and new and determined the 3,000 mile uproot was going to fix you, somehow. Make a new, better Monica.

The phone starts ringing back inside your apartment. You stick your bare feet through the metal rungs, still warm from the day, wiggling your toes in the empty air.

The machine clicks.

_Monica, hello. It’s Laurie Bream from Raviga, your boss. Mr. Bachmann has called the office six times since seven PM tonight, demanding to speak with you about a complication with the beta test of Pied Piper’s video chat app. Please attend to him as soon as possible. Goodbye._

You take a deep breath, as deep as you can manage with a throat still a little choked with tobacco smoke. You tug your feet free and turn around, your hand already reaching out for your phone, like it’s the only life preserver in the San Francisco Bay.


End file.
